Surveillance capitalism
Etymology
The term was coined and developed by scholar Shoshana Zuboff, first in essays around 2014 and then in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It fuses "surveillance," from the French surveiller (to watch over), with "capitalism" to argue that watching itself has become a mode of accumulation. Zuboff’s central claim is that behavioral data is not just collected but manufactured into a market in predictions.
noun phrase · /ser-VAY-lens KAP-ih-tuh-liz-um/
An economic model that turns records of human behavior into data used to predict and influence what people will do, then sells those predictions.
What it names
It reframes "free" services as extraction operations, where your everyday activity is the raw material and behavioral prediction is the product.
Example
Under surveillance capitalism, the point of the fitness app isn’t your health — it’s the behavioral data your workouts generate.
Related idea
Surveillance capitalism is the business model of harvesting behavioral data; the attention economy is the broader market it operates within, competing for the focus that generates that data in the first place.